From the architect. The university is located in Guadalupe, a
garden neighborhood of Santa Fe, whose distinctive characteristics are dense forest,
low building density, and the use that neighbors give the street as a space of
encounter. In this context, the university building, with its pre-existing 12.000
m2 was distinguished by an architecture of a discordant scale regarding its
environment. The project proposes to recreate in its expression and its
spatiality some of the identity attributes of Guadalupe: the vegetation and the
way of appropriating public space. The new building shifts the environmental
character of the streets of the neighborhood to its interior through the use of
vegetation, both in the facade as an environmental filter, and in the heart of
the expansion with the presence of a pink Lapacho tree. Also, an open and
transparent ground floor proposes a new dialogue between the building and the
city, as an interaction between the central courtyard and the street.

The ground floor acts as an institutional
access to the entire educational complex, communicating the north wing and
south wing, and setting a cloister around a central courtyard. From this
dialogic approach, the building becomes urban and the city defines its
architecture, concepts that dematerialize the set demarcations and that propose
a new way of uniting society. Regarding materials used and perceptions
represented, the building recreates three sequenced episodes that correspond to
three material instances: 1 – metal-vegetal, 2 – concrete-vegetal, and 3 – wood-concrete.

A first instance is materialized towards
the street through a vegetal truss contained by a galvanized mesh, laid out as
a shade for the facade, which benefits the interaction of the building with the
Guadalupe surroundings. As a vertical garden, this metallic mesh contains the
planting, irrigation and drainage systems for six types of plant species that
in each season make a natural-artificial event, versatile and changeable. The
building registers a second moment with a succession of spaces that express the
interior-exterior articulation, linking the horizontal aperture of the ground
floor with the vertical tensions generated by the interior courtyard and its
pink Lapacho tree. Like a Roman impluvium, this interior courtyard solves the
drainage system of the building through an overflow of rainwater that trickles
through a plane of concrete from the roof to a ditch on the ground floor.

The third instance, towards the interior
courtyard, offers an answer of contrast and rupture. The wooden parasols
transcribe to the interior of the building a play of projected shadows and
their reflections on the glazed railings, generating an intense environment
where the main interpersonal activities and the encounters between the members
of the university community happen.